A Mother Took Her Child Into an MRI Scanner For the First Time In History. What She Saw Is Incredible.

A baby drifts to sleep in the arms of his mother. She kisses his forehead. The intimate scenario is caught inside a 3T magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Rebecca Saxe, the mother, is an MIT neuroscientist who specializes in scanning children’s brain activity. She brought her two-month-old son Percy into the MRI tube for another purpose, though: because a side-by-side scan of a mother and child had never been taken. The best of 50 scans taken over two days (and after months of preparation) is an old image made new, Saxe says. “The two figures, with their clothes and hair and faces invisible … could be any human mother and child, at any time or place in history.”

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Photograph from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT